Eficiencia

Carl Cederström and Rickard Grassman

In this paper we explore two opposing ways of organizing work. The first relates to (neo-) normative cultures based on the communication of normative ideals. The second involves a radically different form of culture following from what we term the ‘masochistic reflexive’ turn, in and by which cultural transgressions and perversions are encouraged. In order to provide a thick description of each of these cultural forms we draw on two contrasting examples: Google and a London based consulting firm. These empirical discussions are then theoretically problematized and articulated through conceptualizations of the symptom in the works of both Jacques Lacan and Slavoj Žižek. Based on these readings we distinguish (neo-) normative cultures as those that attempt to domesticate the symptom, from masochist reflexive organizations that encourage their employees to enjoy their symptom.

It certainly goes without saying that organizations venture to provide an environment that realizes an optimal amount of productivity. In order to render such ambitions achievable we encounter quite different managerial strategies, each offering or forging a unique presentation of life within the organization. Indeed, organizations, primarily as they appear in the West, are rarely conceived as a simple bureaucratic work-space, in which employees spend eight hours a day, conducting their duties. They are usually considered to be something more, something else. By crafting sophisticated and insidious cultural programmes, organizations have produced and maintained a dizzying array of identities. They have articulated normative frameworks, often with alluring and romantic overtones, through which their values, beliefs and norms can be conveyed (see Abrahamson, 1997; Barley and Kunda, 1992; Ray, 1986).

However, it has been suggested that these normative control approaches have increasingly lost their bite (Adler, 2001; Kunda, 2004; Kunda and Ailon-Souday, 2005). They often rely on rigid templates which employees are not naturally inclined to adopt, let alone internalize. This deficiency does not suggest, however, that normative control has become obsolete. Rather it indicates that normative approaches have instead taken on subtler forms (Bains, 2007; Jermier, 1998), appealing to employees ‘as they really are’, which is sought to be captured in the concept of the ‘neo-normative organization’ (Fleming and Sturdy, 2007). It points to a new strategy for gaining ascendancy over __________

* An earlier version of this paper was presented at a workshop in Leicester, September 2007. The authors wish to thank the participants in this forum. In addition we wish to thank Karl Fotovat for valuable comments and review.

employees, in which ‘front stage’ corporate selves are substituted by authentic selves, predicated on a culturally validated norm of difference (ibid.).

In this study we take Google as an example of how a neo-normative approach is employed that engages a norm of difference. We show how this organization, in addition to celebrating differences and idealizing individuality, offers a whole arsenal of features in order to secure the physical and emotional well-being of their employees (Vise and Malseed, 2005). Sports and food have become essential elements of the Google culture, and these activities are deliberately used as a means to create the impression among employees of not being at work.

However, while neo-normative control perspectives have only begun to spread their seed across the world of organizations, we can nevertheless locate a counter-movement. Far from trying to lull their employees into comfortable and imaginary worlds, certain organizations take the opposite tack: they make a proud case of not providing security, meaning or happiness to their employees. Instead, they offer high salaries and a reflexive organizational culture, perceived to resonate better with the ‘harsh reality’ in which they operate. The employees of these organizations are not only allowed to openly despise their occupation, but they are even compelled to exhibit this disdain in order to fit in. What this form of corporate culture brings to the employees is an injunction to be reflexive and masochistic. To capture this imperative we use the term ‘masochistic reflexive turn’. This term indicates that at the same time as the employees are well aware of their misfortunate situation, they derive some form of enjoyment from it. The term masochism has a long history, stemming from the writing of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch and Marquis de Sade but coined, as well as translated into a medical vocabulary, by Richard von Krafft-Ebing. We will not be offering a thorough account of the dynamics of masochism in this paper. Instead we adopt the word in its most straightforward mode, simply taking masochism to mean “a perversion that is premised on a wish to suffer pain, humiliation, and even torture” (ten Bos, 2007: 545).

The purpose of this paper is to empirically illustrate and theoretically articulate the difference between organizations that employ normative and neo-normative control on the one hand, and the masochistic reflexive organization on the other. To this end we turn to the psychoanalytic notion of the symptom, arguing that organizations of the former kind relate to the symptom as something requiring domestication, such that potentially undesirable expressions that threaten to harm their corporate culture are managed, minimized, marginalized. This orientation to the symptom is rather conventional and indeed culturally ubiquitous. It relies on the rather obvious assumption that an organization, in order to render itself competitive and profitable, requires a workforce exempted from the contingencies of life: fiercely and exclusively committed, spared from severe illness, etc. For if the attention of the employees were entirely occupied by their own symptoms – such as physical or mental sickness, stress, burnout, injuries, or any other form of time-consuming self-pity – it would quite naturally run counter to the aim and mission of the competitive organization.

The masochistic reflexive organization, in contrast, attempts neither to prevent nor to ‘repress’ the symptom. Neither does this particular strategy attempt to secure the well- being of their employees, quite to the contrary, it calls on the employees to identify with

– and enjoy – their symptoms. These organizations exhibit loyalty to a perverted form of the Lacanian maxim: Enjoy your Symptom (to borrow the title from Žižek, 1992), in which the symptom is not figured as a deviant sign of illness to be fought, but rather as a manifestation faithful to the pervasive structures of capitalist society and thus to be

cherished. In order to illustrate these two opposing relations toward the symptom we draw on two examples: Google and a London based consultancy firm that we refer to as Leo Ebing.